She wasn’t answering her phone.
Aiden paced the kitchen, swearing silently to himself.
She’d left the house without her wallet. Without her keys. Without even a jacket—though it had been warm enough lately she probably didn’t need one, but the sight of it on the coat tree was still driving him crazy.
He’d texted her a dozen times. Okay, three. He’d texted her three times and tried calling once, but it felt like a thousand.
Tonight had not gone as planned. Not that he’d had a plan. He hadn’t realized he’d never talked to her about his political ambitions. They talked about everything. How could it have not come up? But it must not have because she’d looked at him like he’d smacked her in the face with a two-by-four.
He downed his scotch and started to pour another for himself, but stopped with the bottle halfway to the glass. What if he needed to go pick her up? He needed to be sharp. He set down the bottle, reaching for his phone again at the exact moment it binged with a text alert.
He snatched it up, his eyes racing over the message. I’m fine. Spending the night at Jackie’s. Will be back for work tomorrow.
Back for work. Because that was what he was.
A job. Her employer.
Lines clearly redrawn.
Aiden swore, flinging his phone across the room where it landed harmlessly on the couch, not even having the courtesy to shatter satisfyingly. The scotch bottle was back over his glass a heartbeat later, glugging amber liquid to the top.
It wasn’t like he could argue with her. He was her employer. He had crossed a line. She was simply putting back up the boundaries that they shouldn’t have allowed to fall. But he didn’t want them reconstructed.
He wanted to be with Samira. She’d woken him up, gotten him thinking about his future, and that future had her in it.
Though, admittedly, he hadn’t really thought that part through. Hadn’t really considered what it would be like for her to be strapped onto the political rollercoaster alongside him.
He’d just been happy for the last few weeks and convinced that things would work themselves out. He hadn’t expected her to bolt at the first mention of a campaign. She’d literally run from the building.
He probably should have seen that coming, but he hadn’t been thinking about how a campaign would affect his personal life. He should have been. He should have been thinking of his girls. Of Samira. Chloe had been raised in a family as politically active as his. She’d been poised to be a political wife, eager for it. He’d sometimes wondered if that was the whole reason she married him—not that she didn’t love him, just that it was a lot easier to love him because of the family connections that came with him.
But that wasn’t Samira. She was shy. Self-contained. Private.
He might lose her if he went into public life—may have lost her already at just the mention of it—but he still felt like it was his destiny somehow. Things had started to click into place. He felt like he was meant to be a public servant, like if he could just get into political office he could finally do something about all the things that made him feel helpless and powerless—
But he’d also started to feel like he was meant to be with Samira and those two destinies looked like they were mutually exclusive. How could he pick which part of himself he wanted to be true to?
Though now that he’d boarded the rollercoaster this morning by telling his mother his plans, he wasn’t sure he could stop the ride even if he wanted to. His family was a force of nature.
He drained his scotch, drinking it far too fast, not taking the time to let the flavors roll over his senses. The kick of the spirits hitting his senses was almost as satisfying as the pleasant numbness that followed. He poured another, filling the glass to the brim, needing the respite from his own good sense.
He’d felt free these last few weeks, flying high on life, but now he felt trapped again. His life once again a room where the walls were steadily closing in.
Maybe he should just run away to California like Candy had done. The third of the four Raines siblings had always been something of an enigma—at least for as long as he could remember. Always keeping herself separate. Keeping the family at arm’s length.
He didn’t know how she had done it. How she’d just walked away and left the family behind. Was there was some switch inside him that he could flip off and just stop being someone who cared about changing the world? The idea was like a shirt that didn’t fit, tight and tearing at the seams.
He was well into his fourth glass of scotch when he retrieved his cell phone from its landing pad on the couch and glared for only a moment at Samira’s text before pulling up his sister’s contact. Candice Raines-Xiao. Who’d moved to California when she was eighteen and never looked back. How had she done that? How had she managed to break free of the need to please their family? Of the need to please everyone? Did she just not have it? Could they really be that different and still come from the same gene pool?
He punched through the call and the phone rang until his brain registered the darkness of the house around him. Was Candy asleep? No. She was in California. It was earlier in California. What time was it anyway? He squinted toward the glowing lights on the oven, the numbers blurring and shifting before his eyes.
“Aiden?”
“Candy!” There she was. Not asleep after all. Ha. Take that, oven clock. “How is the prodigal daughter tonight?”
“Aiden, why are you calling?” Her voice was sharp with disapproval, as if she could see him swaying on his feet. “Isn’t it like two in the morning there?”
The lights on the oven came into focus. “One seventeen,” he corrected, enjoying the satisfying precision of the numbers. “And can’t I call just because I want to talk to my big sis?”
“You never have before.”
That wasn’t strictly true, but it felt true. They went too long without talking, him and Candy. She’d put a country between them and he’d let her. “Well, I’m calling now. I heard we’re finally going to meet this infamous husband of yours.”
The elusive Ren. Scott had his doubts that Candy’s husband even existed since none of them had even set eyes on the guy since he and Candy had eloped a few years ago. His big brother had even bet Aiden a hundred bucks that Ren was a figment of Candy’s imagination, but there was something about the way she talked about him sometimes that made Aiden feel like he had to be real. That affectionate irritation. Indulgent tolerance.
Oh yeah. They were married all right.
“I’m not sure we’ll both make it,” Candy said now. “Max may not be able to spare both of us at the same time—it’s such a busy time at EP.”
Aiden didn’t have a clue what made something a busy time for the celebrity security company where Candy and the elusive Ren both worked, but he did know their mother would not be understanding if Ren missed another family function. He bobbled the phone, snorting a little too loudly. “If you’re thinking of screwing with Mom’s plans for the perfect Montgomery-Raines family portrait, you’re braver than I am.”
What would his mother think of adding Samira to that portrait? Which would bother her more? The fact that Samira was Muslim or the fact that she was the Help?
“Aiden? Is everything okay?” Candy must have heard something in his voice.
He was slipping. Letting it all get to him. The bitterness. The futility. “Peachy keen.”
“Aiden…”
He didn’t wait for her to finish whatever she was about to say. “How did you do it? How did you just walk away?” She made it look so easy. Like he could just decide to be free—when he wasn’t even sure what freedom looked like.
“What?”
He’d managed to surprise her. Not easy to do with Candy. But he wasn’t feeling much like himself tonight. For the first time, the idea of walking away from the family legacy sounded good. He could be with Samira. Raise the girls. Did his life really have to mean more than that?
“We’re spoon fed that shit from the cradle. Family loyalty. Civic service. The great Montgomery-Raines dynasty. Our entire identities are shaped around grooming us for public office and you just decided one day—nope, not gonna do it, gonna run off to California and play with celebrities instead. How did you do that?”
Her answer came without hesitation, unvarnished. “I stopped buying the family propaganda.”
“How?” It had never sounded like propaganda to him. It sounded like truth. Meaning. The guiding principles of his life. How did he walk away from that? How did he walk away from who he was, who he was meant to be, for someone he wasn’t even sure wanted to be with him? “Never mind.” He released a ragged sigh. “Not like it would do me any good anyway. Night, Candy. See you at the wedding.”
He thumbed off the call without waiting for a reply. No closer to figuring out what he wanted to do than he had been before he called. And wishing, stupidly, for Samira to talk it through.